


A Meeting of Monsters

by CarpeDiemForLife



Series: The Malice and Caprice of Time [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Characters helping each other deal with trauma, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Incest, Not quite that intense but just in case, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Once again nothing incest actually happens, Sibling Incest, Suicidal Thoughts, Unrequited Love, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26081458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarpeDiemForLife/pseuds/CarpeDiemForLife
Summary: Returning from a walk one day, Five discovers something has gone wrong at home. Faced with the fear of losing his sister and best friend, he behaves recklessly. A vulnerable Five and Vanya share some of their dark, hidden scars with each other, and together take their first steps toward healing.Set after a canon divergent 2019, wherein the Apocalypse was averted and the Hargreeves are now living out their lives. Doesn't acknowledge season 2.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Series: The Malice and Caprice of Time [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1893496
Comments: 13
Kudos: 150





	A Meeting of Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> I intend for this to be a series of separate oneshots, all existing in the same universe/timeline but able to be read individually if desired. At this point, a year or so has passed since the end of season 1, so Five is 59 going on 14 ;)
> 
> The characters are as portrayed in the show, so if you don't like, please don't read. Thank you so much for the response to the first story in this series <3 Please drop a comment if you like it!

Five was halfway through his walk when it started to rain. Annoyed—the forecast hadn’t predicted rain—he did something his siblings would no doubt find foolish. He teleported home to his bedroom, grabbed an umbrella, and teleported back into the city to finish his walk.

These walks had become part of his daily routine. They reminded him of a different time, of a time when he was older. As a child, Five never had this much freedom, to wander the streets of the city as he pleased, however far and however long. Now he could. And in the indifference of strangers, their eyes glazing past him, unseeing, unthinking, he could believe himself a man, for there was no one to look and tell him differently.

Perhaps, too, there was a part of his mind, a stubborn, irrational part, that believed he could walk himself into a new year, a new decade, a new lifetime, by sheer force of will. That if he only kept moving his feet, eventually his step would lengthen and his spine would stretch, until his outsides matched his insides.

Or something like it, anyways.

It was just a bonus that his walks also gave him a daily respite from the idiocy of his family. A benefit that was driven home when he turned onto their street and saw four of his siblings a block away, congregated outside the mansion in the middle of a downpour, not one umbrella between them.

He sighed.

His approach was muffled by the rain, and they didn’t notice him as he grew near enough to make out the words accompanying their fierce looks and gestures.

“…you just fly up there or something?” Luther said to Klaus.

The ex-junkie fidgeted under his gaze. “Uh, moi? I don’t know if—”

“Levitation, isn’t that the new power you’ve been practicing?”

“Well, yeah, I mean… My grip on it is still kinda tenuous, but uh…” Klaus licked his lips and glanced upward. “I guess I could try?”

“No.” Diego’s hand was firm on his shoulder before the words were fully out of his mouth. “He’s not doing anything he doesn’t feel is safe.”

Luther’s lips pursed. Five could already hear his retort: _We_ all _do things that aren’t safe, Diego_. To his surprise, Luther gave a curt nod instead. There was a tempered resignation in his eyes, something more like concern than anger.

“Then what do you suggest?” he asked.

It was Allison who answered, her voice quiet and a bit raspy. As she’d done since her vocal cords healed enough to speak again, she used only short words and phrases, enough to get her point across and no more.

“Wait for Five,” she said.

Five felt a burst of glee. He wondered how long it would take them to notice him standing not five feet away. Did he have time to pop into the kitchen, grab a bowl of popcorn, and pop back? No, that was too likely to give the game away.

“Worst comes to worst,” Diego said, a shit-eating grin trained on Luther, “you can use that big ass gorilla body for something useful and break the fall.”

While it was fun to watch his siblings bicker, Five didn’t _actually_ want to see them hurt each other, so he chose this moment to announce his presence with the metal squeal of the gate.

“You know,” he said as his sopping wet siblings spun towards him, “for a group called the Umbrella Academy, this is a pretty poor—”

“Vanya,” Allison interrupted, pointing.

Five’s mouth snapped shut. His eyes followed the trajectory of her finger.

There, standing near the edge of the roof, buffeted by wind and rain that he instantly understood to be of her own making, was Vanya.

He hissed. “What the hell happened?!”

“We don’t know!” said Luther.

“And none of you idiots went up there after her?” Five yelled.

“Gee, if only _we’d_ thought of that,” said Klaus with his particular brand of airy sarcasm.

“We tried, dipshit,” was Diego’s more direct response. “The door to the roof wouldn’t budge, like she’s got it—”

Five blinked, teleporting right up to the roof.

He landed ten feet behind Vanya, his umbrella forgotten in the jump. Rain quickly soaked through his uniform—

God, that was infantilizing. He looked like a child next to her! Why hadn’t he bought new clothes yet? He’d had more than a year to do so.

Oh wait, he remembered. Because Klaus would throw a tantrum if Five went shopping with anyone but him, and he could bear neither the thought of going alone and being treated like a kid by the store clerks nor the mortification of having Klaus as his tag-along.

—making him as much a drowned rat as all the rest of his siblings.

“Vanya!” he shouted over the storm.

“Leave me alone, Five,” she called back.

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Why, are you afraid I’ll blow up the world again?”

Five made no answer to that; he knew she was baiting him.

“Whatever’s going on, we can talk about it inside,” he said.

“I like it out here.”

With each second that passed, Five’s anxiety ratcheted higher. He reminded himself that nothing bad could happen to her—he would intercept her mid-fall and teleport them both to solid ground, if he had to. Even if he missed—he wouldn’t—Luther was there to catch her. Nothing bad could happen.

(For now he ignored the voice that whispered in his mind, _Clearly, something bad already did._ )

He was about to explain all this to her—maybe she would listen to reason even if his own heart wouldn’t—when he instead decided: _Screw it_. There wasn’t time for this. There never was, when he needed it. Like a wild animal enraged by its master’s leash, time did its best to spite him at every possible turn.

Calculating his equation with deadly precision, Five took a deep breath and jumped.

Blue lightning flashed. The air crackled like thunder. His heel slipped, scraping off the edge, finding air where he’d meant to put roof. His body lilted backwards. Mere inches away, Vanya’s eyes widened with horror, and they stared at one another through a curtain of rain as he began to fall. A mistake of centimeters in trying to plant himself in the narrow space between her and the lip of the roof.

In that second, all his training deserted him. The rain on his cheek felt like the tender brush of death, and he was so paralyzed by fear that he could do nothing but acquiesce to his fate.

His feet left the roof.

“ _Five_!” Vanya screamed.

There was a sonic explosion and an incredible force slammed into Five’s back, pushing him up, up, until—

Vanya grabbed him by the shirtfront and _yanked_ , pulling him back over the edge and straight into her. They went down in a mess of limbs.

Five’s world went black, the air driven from his lungs. The force of impact reverberated through him. He hissed at his cacophony of new aches and pains, singing from every bruise that her elbows and other bony parts had sunk into his flesh.

A groan sounded beneath him. Hazy, Five pushed himself up on wobbly arms and waited for his senses to come back into focus.

His first thought was, _Huh. The rain stopped._

Then he froze.

He was on top of Vanya. Their legs were still tangled up together, and his stomach pressed against hers. He’d only managed to raise himself a couple inches, which was good because she could breathe now, her chest heaving up and down as she got in more air, but so much of her was still touching him, and her face was so close, the color of her complexion heightened by the shine of water, and—

Fire blazed to life in his cheeks, burning like a fuse all the way through him. He threw himself to the side. His hip screamed as it slammed into the ground, and he collapsed in a heap by himself. The whole of his back ached something fierce. He breathed heavily.

There was a scraping sound, and Vanya rose up on her elbow next to him.

“Are you okay?” she asked worriedly.

Swallowing, he nodded. “Yeah, I- I’m okay. Are you?”

“Just a little winded.” She gave him a half-smile, but he didn’t have the energy to reciprocate. He was exhausted in too many different ways. He let his head fall back against the roof, then winced. For a blissful moment he rested there in silence.

“Five, why the hell did you do that?”

The anger in her voice shot him full of adrenaline, momentarily dulling his pain. He looked up. Vanya was climbing back to her feet, so he followed suit with a grimace. Once standing, he brushed his raw, scraped-up palms down his soggy blazer.

“What else was I supposed to do?” he shot back, too keyed-up to deal with one of her bursts of temper right now. “Let you jump?”

Her mouth gaped open. “Let… I wasn’t going to jump!”

“ _What were you doing, then_?”

“I… I just needed some air, all right? Some space. A… a new perspective. That’s all.”

The worst part was, she meant it. There was something she wasn’t saying, some tension in her face that he couldn’t decipher, but her words were true. She’d never intended to…

“God _damn_ it, Vanya!” Fists clenched, he stepped towards her, then away again, nervous energy forcing him to move. He couldn’t relax. Pain radiated from his body: his sore back, his throbbing hip, the dozen thimble-sized bruises that pricked at his mind. “You can’t _do_ that, for _fuck’s_ sake.”

She flinched—maybe at his tone, but probably at his profanity, and an even greater fury vibrated in his bones. When would they see that he _wasn’t a fucking kid anymore_.

Her expression hardened and she drew herself up. “Can’t do what? Go where I want in my own house?”

“You can’t _come_ up here in the middle of your _own thunderstorm_ and stand on the _edge of the roof_ just to get a ‘new perspective.’”

Thunder rumbled. A slight wind picked up, but Five hardly noticed, too furious to care. He’d seen enough of his siblings dead for one lifetime, and here was Vanya, treating the idea with flippancy, not giving a damn about how her actions affected him. About the scars she had unwittingly torn open.

He trembled from the force of his hurt, rage, desire, fear. “What’s the _matter_ with you?”

“Maybe that I’m a monster!”

He reeled back.

Tears shimmered in her eyes, and at the same time they fell to her cheeks, the sky opened up again. Rain poured down. Her shoulders shook, either from the cold or her sobs.

“I’m- I’m a murderer,” she said. “I c-… I see it in my nightmares, all the time. I relive what I did, over and over and over again. The way that I- I enjoyed it. The power. The control.” She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed her eyes shut, keening like an animal caught in a trap. “I just… wanted something to make it stop. T-To wash it all away and make me… clean again. I don’t want to be this way!”

“Vanya.” At last his body stilled, all thoughts of his own aches shoved aside. He took a few careful steps closer to her. “You’re not a monster. What you have is a gift. It’s our dad's fault that you never learned how to control it. But we fixed everything, remember? The Apocalypse never happened. You didn’t hurt any—”

“I’m not talking about them!”

Brown eyes flashed open at him. Good, at least this hadn’t gone critical.

But what did she mean by—

“I’m talking about Leonard. And Pogo.”

Oh.

Five took a deep breath. “Pogo’s alive too, remember? We saved him when we altered the timeline.”

He reached out a hand. Vanya stumbled back from it, thunder cracking above them though he’d seen no lightning. He dropped his hand like her rejection had burned him.

“That doesn’t _matter_ ,” she wailed. Her fingers clutched at her head. “I killed him; I _remember_ killing him. And I _liked_ doing it. I almost… killed Allison, too. And what I did to Leonard? I- I thought I _loved_ him”—Five’s heart clenched—“and I still killed him. I _tortured_ him. If he deserved to die, then so do I. I’m as much a monster as he was.”

“Fine,” said Five. “Then condemn me to die, too.”

Vanya’s head snapped up, and her big brown eyes locked on him. The rain abated a little.

“What?”

“I’m far worse a monster than either of you,” he said, his smile more like a grimace. “I’ve killed dozens of people, _hundreds_. Not by accident. Not because they deserved it. Because I was told to. And I was good at it. If you deserve to die for killing your abusers—”

Vanya sucked in a harsh breath at the word. The wind died down and her hair quit its mad dance, settling against her shoulders. The rain lessened to barely a drizzle.

“—then my punishment must be far more severe. Go ahead. Hate me. Call me murderer, call me monster. Curse me in every language you know.”

She wouldn’t, he told himself. She would never do those things. This was a game, a ploy to get through to her. He had nothing to fear.

The pit in his stomach suggested otherwise.

“Tear me apart first, if you’re going to do this to yourself.”

_Because I cannot bear to watch._

Vanya was silent. The storm had ceased, but her eyes—now puffy from crying—were still fixed on him, her thoughts unreadable.

Five threw his arms out to the side. “Well?” he offered. “Pronounce your judgment on me. I won’t fight. Push me back over the edge that you saved me from, if you—”

Sense and gravity returned to her countenance. Vanya crossed the distance and threw herself into his open arms. He froze, a protest echoing through his tender flesh.

But Five was well used to ignoring the demands of his body, especially when something more important was at stake.

At Vanya’s touch, a ball of tightly coiled emotion in his chest unwound, and he was horrified to feel tears spring to his eyes. Fuck, _fuck_. He hadn’t cried in many, many years. What was his body doing, betraying him this way? _Why_? He wouldn’t allow it.

“I’m sorry,” Vanya murmured, her voice still a bit clogged from her own tears. “I’m sorry, Five.”

His muscles began to shake from the tension coursing through them. Bit by bit, he relaxed them, until he could close his arms loosely around her in return.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. One of her hands brushed through his hair. “I could never hate you. You’re not a monster.”

Letting himself go for the first time in… decades, easily… Five let out a full-blown sob. His arms clutched her tighter and tighter, so tight it had to hurt, but she didn’t complain. He buried his face in her shoulder.

“Please,” he said, his voice muffled in her shirt, and God, what would their siblings think if they could see all this? Five vulnerable? Crying? Asking someone ‘ _please_ ’? A shudder rippled through him. Vanya. Only Vanya. “Don’t scare me like that. I already lost you once, I can’t do it again.”

“You’re not going to lose me.”

They held onto one another for a long time. When they finally let go, Five looked straight into her eyes. His left hand twitched with the desire to reach up and smooth away the last sign of her tears, but it remained dutifully by his side.

“I’ll help you get through this,” he said. “We _all_ will. Lest you forget, everyone in this house has killed people. You’re actually the last one to do it, so…”

She laughed. “Comforting.”

“My point is, we’ve all had time to deal with it. To find ways to keep it from killing us. It won’t go away in one night, or one year. But you’re not alone, Vanya.”

Her eyes were shining a little too brightly, and if he didn’t do something about it, his heart might explode out of his chest.

Clearing his throat, he glanced aside. “And I’m sure they’re all eager to tell you that too. We should go, show everyone you’re okay.” Barely waiting for a nod, Five headed for the door inside. He still wasn’t great at teleporting with others in tow, and it would be rude to go ahead while she took the long way.

“Hey, Five?”

He turned to face her.

Vanya smiled at him, everything soft and sweet and gentle in her gaze. It was almost hard to believe this was the same person who only minutes before was screaming and crying and shattering the heavens.

“We should do that again sometime.”

He raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

Her eyes sparkled. “The hug,” she clarified. “Though maybe less soaking wet.”

Five chuckled. He couldn’t show just how tempting and terrifying he found her innocent proposal. How badly he wanted her touch, no matter how chaste, and how scared he was of getting it.

“Well,” he said, not yet sure if he was lying, “I imagine that can be arranged.”


End file.
